And yet another underground antifreeper campaign being conducted via freepmail

[Nifster]

An oldie but a goody.

The random blogging kitteh looks like me when I get going on a rant. Then I post it and usually find out I totally misunderstood the original post I was responding to

[Reno89519]

Personally I do wonder about how this sustained and why it is still on a San Jose server without rollover protection, dependent on one or two people "driving over tomorrow" to maintain. This may have been a great early on solution but not long term, definitely not sustainable. Seems moving it to the cloud, e.g., a AES server or other solution, is a fraction of the cost, becomes hardware independent, and then sustainable by future "John 2" and others.

And, the money, yes I donate and figure it is either a nice profit to Jim and John, else poorly spent. Whatever, FR is not mine and I'll enjoy it while it is up and running.

Each time FR goes down, I do pause to ask if this is it's final gasp and where I go next, again, because I see or hear absolutely nothing to suggest there is a tomorrow. I suggest, respectfully, instead of bemoaning the tomorrow being independently discussed and created, do something direct with FR, explain there is a tomorrow.

[Tax-chick]

It’s funny that someone would say, “This free service isn’t good enough for me. I’ll show them: I’ll stop using it!” and think that’s a “threat.”

[ConservativeMind]

Jim, I am a monthly donor and not associated with such an email, but is there an opportunity to have a special upgrade fund for changes that could more permanently help? I think you have users who appear willing to help with special one-time funding for equipment or software that would minimize some of our combined frustrations. If software or hardware can't help, while maintaining all the current code base in place, then please state that.

You have many people who make Free Republic their second home. Everyone here wants it to survive beyond either you or ourselves. We also want to minimize hassle and cost for either you or John.

[Vermont Lt]

You missed a comma in there.
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(It’s a joke...)

[palmer]

Reno is correct, instead of dedicated HW, cloud is the way to go. There are a number of pitfalls however that should also be mentioned. Cloud storage is very expensive, it will be your biggest expense by far. Some people will say, hey, I get XX GB or YY TB for free or for cheap from XYZ corp. That's true but that's considered dead storage.

But storage for FR's database will have to be live storage i.e. solid state. I pay $25 / month for 250 GB of live disk storage at digital ocean. You obviously have far more data and can do the math.

You will also be somewhat RAM limited in their offerings (unless you pay more). I believe the bandwidth and CPU should be adequate, but you'd have to check the numbers.

There's no doubt the cloud servers and storage will cost more than your dedicated HW, over the long run. It is after all, a monthly fee for HW rental (virtualized HW at that). There are major security issues with maintaining virtual servers, namely that you have to be very careful about your admin access and that you have to watch for side channel attacks from colocated virtual domains with sloppy security. However the latter is not much different from the physical network attacks in a hosting center, just an added vector to worry about.

Another consideration is that the hosting service could decide to pull the plug for political or tech reasons (or pretend it is tech when it is political). Then you will need to have a failover plan into another cloud host. But so far I have not heard of political problems with Linode, Digital Ocean, or the others I have read about.

[Hardastarboard]

I just donated based on this thread.

[Hardastarboard]

Agreed - It has been pretty evident for a long time that Rush gets a lot of his material from here. Which, frankly, is a good thing.

[mad_as_he$$]

What ever noob! ;-)

[Reno89519]

And, beyond confirming your rudeness and the correct point made by Bartholomew Roberts, what does your comment contribute to the discussion? Your boorish behavior, and others like you, are what ruin FR for everyone.

Now, can we get back to Jim's discussion? What have you to say on that?

[mad_as_he$$]

Hey fool IT WAS A JOKE! Who appointed you the FR police?

Doesn’t matter what I think about JR’s post. He is going to do whatever he wants. If he was going to change his mind then he would of already done so one of the other 100+ times this subject has been discussed.

Feel free to not post to me anymore.

[trebb]

Lots of concern trolls and others who are not ashamed to get in our face about being the idiots that pay their way - I’d love to see a policy where one cannot post/reply until after a first donation of $5 or more and then only as long as a minimum of $5 a month was met.

[wally_bert]

I second that.

[amigatec]

Its my understanding the Jim has MS. My wife also has MS. For those of you that don't understand the medical costs associated with this disease, the costs can enormous. One MS medication costs over $15,000 a month!!! The one my wife takes costs $5,000 a month, and that's for just ONE. Don't know how much Insurance Jim has, but its NEVER enough, luckily we do have good insurance. Not to mention thew cost of other drugs to treat it, the cost of a Wheelchair van, and other costs. Not only that but California has one of the highest costs of living in the country.

I don't know what FR pays in hosting fees, but It isn't cheap.

Somebody wants to complain about FR, they need to live in Jim's Wheelchair for a few days.

[xrmusn]

I’d love to see a policy where one cannot post/reply until after a first donation of $5
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
Even a buck..

Am sure a lot would drop off if they were charged $1

[rlmorel]

Naturally, I would like better response and reliability from the servers too, but I don’t care how much you and your family make...the more the better.

People who bring up profits in the context that you could use less to give them more usually aren’t worth listening to.

[rlmorel]

Yeah. I haven’t seen it yet, though.

[Amadeo]

Did not get the freepmail.

Of course, you’re getting trolled, Jim. Par for the course.

Means you’re successful.

If you monetized the site you’d ruin it. Many would leave.

You just keep doing what God intended, Jim.

Bless you and your family, TRUE AMERICANS.

JT

[DoodleDawg]

We see from the numbers that EXCLUDING expenses (collocation, bandwidth, legal, credit card processing fees, etc.) Jim (and I assume John shares) is pulling in a cool quarter million per year from this.

Well if this putz is right and you're paying for support, bandwidth, legal, processing, administration and all the rest on less than $50,000 a year then you're in the wrong business. You could make much more consulting and teaching other companies just how they can accomplished such a miracle, too.

[thoughtomator]

I do have to say that if the chronic technical issues were my responsibility, they would have been long ago solved.

Can’t think of any significant IT system I’ve encountered in two decades plus of enterprise computing in which this low level of reliability and performance would have been tolerated. Speaking perfectly frankly, if you ran a business-critical system in this manner for an operation in my area of responsibility, I would be forced to fire you to keep my own butt out of liability; it wouldn’t even be optional.

On the day I signed up for FR I was a junior programmer becoming a senior programmer. Now 20 years later I have a fair claim to be one of the most skilled and experienced business information techs on the planet. I’ll make one last offer to help then I’ll keep my peace on this issue.